Some Excerpts, and photos at the article, but I guess we wont look for it anytime soon on a Palm...

"To me, the most important feature in this operating system is its compatibility with legacy Palm OS applications. Access has built a compatibility engine called GHost into ALP that handles this task.

I can attest to the fact that it really works. The guys from Access showed me a Palm OS application running on an evaluation device, and it worked fine, even though the smartphone had a QVGA screen. This is a different screen resolution than the software had been designed for, but ALP scaled it down.

But this OS doesn't stop with legacy software. Developers have the option of writing native applications specifically for ALP, plus it includes a Java virtual machine (JVM). All three types of applications are displayed together in the program launcher, not segregated by type."

Sounds promising, but I really don't understand why all these "brilliant" interface designers think row after row of icons, scrolling through multiple screens, is an efficient way to interact with the device.

If the only way to access program on your desktop computer was through dozens and dozens of icons arrayed on the screen, I think most of us would be pretty annoyed at having to search through them all to find the app we want. If all those icons were displayed in 2 or 3 columns, forcing us to scroll and scroll, I think we'd dislike it even more.

Yet that's what all these brilliant designers at Apple and ALP think is a good idea, even though scrolling on a handheld is less convenient (no mouse) than on a desktop.

My Windows desktop lets me access programs in multiple ways: icons, menus, menus grouped according to MY categories, hot keys, and probably more. I'm not surprised Apple doesn't give us lots of choices: Job's can't imagine that his vision isn't perfection. But I would hope for more from other designers.

At least with ALP, I expect 3rd party developers will give us new versions of apps like Aardquick, ZLauncher, etc. I sure hope ALP can sell this to hardware vendors, because I've just about given up hope that Palm will survive, and I'll use a WinMob 5 or 6 phone only as a last resort.